In a bit of a surprise move, it was announced late last week that Jezebel, the liberal feminist-centric website, was going to be shuttered by parent company G/O Media and its staff laid off. The 16-year-old site has been going through a challenging year in looking for solutions due to dwindling advertising revenues that have been plaguing the industry, and Axios reported last month that G/O was shopping the site around, looking for a buyer. One of the indicators is that the firebrand site was distancing advertisers, an effect that has cropped up in recent years due to left-wing hostility towards others.

As a right-of-center entity, Townhall Media (parent of Redstate) is all too familiar with the moves made against its property by those on the left in the form of silencing methods. Articles are frequently flagged by search engines, and social media platforms are prone to take down or throttle particular entries that veer from accepted narratives – accuracy be damned. Another tactic employed is going after the advertising side of the equation.

By positioning certain content as controversial or even toxic, this claim is then used to frighten off advertisers in an effort to suffocate sites by strangling the ad revenue. There are many methods for this ploy. One is working in concert with “misinformation police” sources, such as NewsGuard, which will rate down sites and have them deemed dangerous to potential companies. Other groups, such as Check My Ads, target both the companies and the online advertising exchanges to compel them to stop their commercial placements on sites deemed “dangerous.”

But as the online advertising marketplace becomes more shaky and advertisers more skittish to any controversy, this effort is beginning to cross over and affect those on the left as well. Vice News, as just one example, has been enduring lengthy battles with diminished revenues, seeing numerous layoffs as its brand of journalism is scaring off many advertisers. And now we learn that Jezebel was also experiencing this very same problem.

At 404 Media, they spoke with insiders from Jezebel as well as former workers, and they detailed some of the challenges they were facing and the commands from management regarding reversing its fortunes. It turns out that the CEO of G/O Media was looking to soften the content on the site, as they suspected that some of the more edgy entries were probably spooking advertisers away.

Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor-in-chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff.

This went even beyond just controversial articles and topics. The management moved to take down the site’s long-used tagline, “Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With teeth.” This was said to actually pay some dividends, as the editing team began to see ads placed by major brands they previously had not seen on the site. But this was a case of coming up with a small solution late in the game. The site was not able to mount a comeback.

This problem being noted is one that the activist set on the left has fostered, and as the advertising market is shrinking, companies have become conditioned to shy away from what are at least claimed to be problematic or controversial sites. The woke movement in recent years has shown that companies are scared off by the perception of controversy online, even when the reality is those complaining are usually not part of a brand’s core customer base.

But in the case of Jezebel’s demise, it certainly looks like the site is absorbing the effects of this negative advertising market created by leftist agitators. While conservative outlets are frequently hit with charges of “misinformation” and a variety of controversial accusations, advertisers are now sidestepping those areas in general that can foster emotional reactions with polarizing content – on either side of the political realm. 

Jezebel was, as one example of inflammatory content, very pro-abortion, a topic that always inspires emotional reactions. As a result, the site was paying the price of the conditioning made upon advertisers to steer away from inflammatory topics – and the sites that center on said topics.

The subtext here is that Jezebel’s content was hard to sufficiently monetize. This should not be the case considering that millions of people read it and chose, specifically, to visit Jezebel every month. But this is unfortunately how the internet works now, and has for a long time: News terrifies brands big and small, to the point where “brand safety” and “brand suitability” have become gigantic industries that have brought even giants like Facebook and Google to heel. 

And there it is. The push to demonize and demonetize certain controversial outlets has created a virus in the advertising industry, and as a result, more than just the hoped-for targets are beginning to feel the effects. If only those on the left had listened to those cautioning about this type of unintended backlash; unfortunately, they were pushing to silence those who were issuing those very warnings.